Strange Stuff in Celebrities’ Storage

A self storage unit is a great place to stash things that you can’t bear to look at, but you also can’t bear to throw away. Take, for example, the canoe that my friends and I paddled down the Cahulawassee River on a memorable girl-getaway to Georgia back in the 1970s. I remember being chased by a couple of inbred hillbillies for a fraction of the trip. After an unspeakable encounter with them in the woods, we were compelled to murder them. Those were the days. Naturally I wanted to save that canoe as a keepsake, but my husband wouldn’t let me keep it in the house. Oh wait, that wasn’t me. That was Burt Reynolds. Yes, Burt held onto the canoe from Deliverance, keeping it handy in storage should he ever need to relive the memories of filming that disturbing flick. Along with it he stowed away the arrow set and the jacket he wore on set. But wait, there’s more: His storage also contained a horse carriage built by Dolly Parton, a Smokey and the Bandit toy car, and a chair made out of hockey sticks from the film Mystery, Alaska. The list goes on and on. In fact, Reynolds held on to so much memorabilia that it now populates a kitsch museum in Jupiter, Florida. Deliverance co-star Jon Voight defined him as a “pack rat,” yet Reynolds isn’t the only celebrity to squirrel away oddities outside the home. Last week, a VIP’s six-foot-tall Elvis Presley statue received press attention nationwide. The life-size figure – auctioned from former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s self storage in arrears* – sold for over $20,000. Alison Howard, a writer for Details.com, uncovered even more quirky things kept in the storage units of the rich and famous—from Paris Hilton’s photos of her swapping spit with Val Kilmer** to Nicolas Cage’s Tarbosaurus skull (which Leonardo DiCaprio also bid on, leading one to wonder what kind of stuff DiCaprio has stashed away). And that’s just the ones we know about. I would bet that Lady Gaga has a vast self storage warehouse somewhere, piled to the rafters with peculiar costumes, tubes of [fake] blood, cases of stylish condoms (she’s a safe sex spokesperson, after all), and who knows what else. Does anyone else hear dueling banjoes in the background of “Bad Romance”? *Blagojevich owed a six figure tab on his storage. How is that even possible?! **Ew. Have you seen anything in the news about celebrity storage? Comment below!